About Us

We were home educated

Our Story

After Elly’s day at school and subsequent extended hiatus, like many home educator’s our mum and dad discovered home education was a thing. This left them with a million unanswered questions but, as we weren’t on any register, they had the luxury over the next decade of discovering the answers without the additional stress of a local authority breathing down their necks. 

I’m going to tell you a little about what our home education looked like but before I do I should make it clear that over the years we met and knew home educated children who were educated in every conceivable manner – we had friends who were very religious, we had friends who were following various curricula, we had friends who were autonomously educated, and we had friends who were radically unschooled. Some had been home educated since toddlerdom, others came out of school as teenagers. We had friends who were musical, friends who were sporty, lots of friends who were artistic: they are all grown up now and one thing stands out above all else, they are all lovely well adjusted adults doing well at whatever path they have chosen.  

So what about us, what did our education look like and where did it lead us? Well I think it’s fair to say we were at the autonomous end of the scale – we weren’t nearly as autonomous as our ‘radically unschooled’ peers but we were a lot more autonomous than the curriculum followers. When I talk to my sister our predominant memories are that it just didn’t feel like ‘education’ at all – we just lived with our mum and dad – we did the things they did – we shopped, went to the library, shopped, went to groups to see friends, shopped, went to camps, shopped, played video games, shopped… you get the idea. There was just a lot of living and basically we were apprentices to our mum and dads lives.

When we reached college age our friends began to drift into colleges and so we followed. I did a BTech and Elly did A Levels. We both did well – I got all distinctions and Elly upset Oxford by rejecting them, becoming briefly famous in the process. I went on to teach outdoor education and then trained as a programmer. Meanwhile Elly went to UCL to study law and is still in academia; she’s recently been working on the Windrush scandal. To this day neither of us has a GCSE in anything.

We did find college incredibly interesting – neither of us had ever been in any type of formal educational setting and so we had all sorts of expectations as to what school would be like; we were so wrong – we both blame Harry Potter for this! Only a few of our new college peers seemed to be engaged, a lot just seemed very disinterested. This was genuinely surprising  – all our home-ed friends were enthusiastic, they had all chosen to go to college, they had all chosen what they wanted to do and, as a result, they all did well. In some ways it felt profoundly unfair – we’d sat around having a lovely stress free life camping and playing video games and we were now doing really well whereas our school friends had had years of monotony and boredom and endless tests and exams, and yet many of them were struggling.

That’s not to say school had this effect on everyone – while many of our peers were clearly disaffected and bored – there were others who were doing really well; did they have an advantage due to their school education? Possibly – they were certainly more used to exams and tests and that was a skill we entirely lacked. However it didn’t feel like they were miles ahead academically despite the fact that neither of us had any academic experience at all. We did lack a certain type of cultural acclimatisation – we had to contend with a dynamic that everyone apart from us took completely for granted but to us appeared in many ways to be completely arbitrary. 

The other big difference, ironically given the attitude of so many local authorities, was we were much more broadly socialised and accepting of difference. If you’ve spent any time with home educating families you have spent time with a diversity of characters that you simply never meet in a school environment; my school friends had never had this experience and this was very apparent in their attitude to anyone who didn’t conform to a very narrow range of what was deemed ‘normal’; it was pretty clear why schools have a bullying problem.

Fast forward many years and Elly has little ones herself and we have younger home educated siblings. And one thing was obvious to both of us, the type of education we and our friends had is becoming more and more difficult to provide. The form that recently arrived at our parents house from the local authority was all about full time education, literacy and numeracy, learning environment, progress… frankly it was intimidating to home educators like our parents who have been successfully home educating for 30 years and have overwhelming proof it works; it’s difficult to imagine how scary this would be for a parent starting out. The consequence of this can be seen all over social media – endless worries and concerns about evidencing education. 

This got us wondering, how would we evidence education – any education? This led us into the rabbit hole of ‘what is education anyway?’ How did we get educated despite what appeared to be a total lack of ‘education’ – what on earth was going on? And the more we talked the clearer it became that the only thing that actually mattered was having someone who cared about your education. Months and months of discussion had come to this. We think it applies equally to school education – basically at some point, in order to do well, someone has got to care about your education. The reason that home educated children tend to do well is that almost by definition they have someone who cares about their education. What does this care look like? Mainly it looks like worry! 0ur parents worried – were they doing the right thing – were we happy – did we spend enough time with other children – and strangely it is this worry that is really the indicator that someone cares about your education. Because at heart education is helping a person develop, and the important bit here is the word ‘helping’. From the moment we are born we are dependent on having someone who cares enough to help us develop. This doesn’t magically change at five – we are still utterly dependent on someone to care for us and the truth is that person is almost always a parent or parents whether we go to school or not. This is why children with a lot of parental input do so much better than their peers at school.

But here’s the problem – how on earth does a local authority measure the amount of help a child is getting to develop? To be fair to them, it’s difficult. So instead they measure a proxy for caring and the proxies they choose are ‘literacy’, ‘numeracy’ and ‘socialisation’. Just a quick aside here – a proxy is an indirect measure – so you count the number of umbrellas a shop sells to work out how bad the weather has been – the number of umbrellas sold is a proxy for how bad the weather has been – likewise the number of ice creams sold is a proxy for sunny weather. The thinking goes that if a parent can prove their children are ‘progressing’ in these numeracy and literacy then they must care about education. I think that’s probably true as far as it goes – but in the process the local authorities have forgotten, or perhaps were never aware, that this is just a proxy. Caring about your child’s education isn’t ‘numeracy’ – a much better measure is parental input. It may be the case that the parental input is in the direction of ‘numeracy’ – perhaps they have organised some online maths tuitions – but equally it may be a conversation about the news or a game of chess or organising for them to go to cubs or a chat on the way to the shops or literally any interaction between a child and a person who cares about them. 

And then we had an idea: what if we turn this on its head? Instead of measuring the proxy, how about measuring the real indicator of a good education – that is the parental involvement – and instead use parental involvement as a proxy for ‘numeracy, literacy and socialisation’. This is like trying to work out how bad the weather is by measuring how many days it rains and then making a guess at how many umbrellas a shop has sold. And it was ultimately this thought that led to the EHEapp. The idea is that whatever input you provide as a parent, whether it’s helping your child to follow a curriculum or conversations about the size of the universe or taking them shopping or a visit to an interesting exhibition or a trip to the cinema or a chat about something they’ve watched on telly, you just log it because this is what actually matters. The app then turns this into something the authorities understand.